The Department of Home Affairs has begun work on its national facial recognition database, putting a large project for consolidating national ID matching to tender last week.
Home Affairs is looking for a company that will “build and deploy” this system which will include migrating a pre-existing centralised database of facial images collected from state driver licenses, as first reported by InnovationAus.
Legislation for governing the identity matching system and associated facial recognition database was proposed in mid-2019.
But it hit a snag when a parliamentary committee review found the laws should be redrafted in order to make Home Affairs’ new capability “built around privacy [and] transparency” and “subject to parliamentary oversight” including basic annual reporting on the use of the identity-matching services.
